by Vaseem Khan
‘You seem very passionate about the subject.’
‘I’m a palaeographer by training,’ said Forrester. ‘I was unable to practise due to an unfortunate marriage.’
This surprised Persis. Neve Forrester did not seem the type of woman to allow a man to dictate her fate. ‘There’s nothing more to be learned here,’ she said. ‘I’ll need that list of acquaintances as soon as you can get it to me.’
Outside the home, Persis examined the neighbouring buildings. One was an abandoned old house, similar in form to Healy’s. The doors and windows were boarded up. A dead end.
On the other side were the premises of a corporate enterprise.
She spoke briefly to a guard sitting inside the gate.
‘Do you know the man who lives next door? The white man?’
The guard scratched thoughtfully under his armpit, gawping at her uniform. ‘I’ve seen him, madam. I don’t know him.’
‘Did you see him yesterday? Or this morning?’
He thought about it, then shook his head.
‘When was the last time you saw him?’
‘The day before yesterday. He left his house in the morning.’
‘Did he leave by car?’
‘No, madam. He always walks.’
Chapter 3
Persis was greeted outside the fire temple by Krishna, her father’s driver, cook, manservant, and all-round dogsbody. Krishna had been a fixture in the Wadia household since Persis had been a child. Following the death of her mother, Krishna had served as a sort of nanny, helping her father to raise the seven-year-old girl he’d suddenly found in his sole care.
Not that either of them had been any good at it.
It was fortunate that her mother’s younger sister, Aunt Nussie, had been on hand to steady the ship. Nussie’s well-meaning efforts had been hindered by the ongoing animosity between her and Sam Wadia, an antipathy that stemmed from the fact that her father had eloped with her mother. As Nussie had been at pains to explain to her, Persis’s mother – Sanaz – and Nussie herself hailed from grander Parsee stock than her father. Sanaz had married below her station.
Persis wondered why her aunt was mystified that Sam held such a low opinion of her.
She left Krishna leaning against her father’s Ambassador, and walked past the enormous door statues, a pair of winged, human-headed bulls – the lamassu – and entered the temple. Stepping briskly through the outer courtyard and into the main hall, she encountered the familiar scent of burning sandalwood.
Inside the hall, a congregation milled about, some seated, some chatting in corners.
A pair of priests in white moved among the mourners, offering words of advice and consolation.
She spotted her father, sitting in the corner of the hall in his wheelchair, head bent into conversation with Dr Shaukat Aziz, one of his oldest friends.
She wondered briefly how Aziz had managed to get into the temple. Entry into agiaries was generally prohibited to non-Parsees. The fire here had been continuously lit for over a century, symbolic of Ahura Mazda’s eternal flame, transported from Persia, original home of the Zoroastrian faith, before Muslim persecution had sent them eastwards to the subcontinent.
She made her way to Sam, then dropped into a seat beside him. He broke off from his discussion with Aziz and glared at her. ‘The least you could have done is change out of your uniform.’
‘I’m still on duty, Papa.’
‘Boman was your uncle. You’ll probably turn up at my death ceremony wearing a swimsuit.’
She refrained from pointing out that Boman Mistry was her father’s third cousin, once removed. She remembered him as a greying moustache occasionally floating in and out of her childhood. In truth, she’d thought he’d died years earlier, not ten days ago. By now the vultures at the Towers of Silence where his body had been left to desiccate would have had their fill. Boman had not been a tall man; the vultures would have made short work of him.
The joke brought a grim smile to her lips.
‘What are you laughing at? You think death is funny?’
‘Acta est fabula, plaudite!’ said Aziz. ‘The play is over, applaud! Emperor Augustus’s last words.’
Sam shot him a venomous look. ‘Why don’t you keep your homilies to yourself? If they find out I smuggled you in under false pretences they’ll ban me from setting foot in here again.’
‘I’m only here to ensure your well-being,’ said Aziz, unruffled. ‘It’s not my fault you had a stroke.’
Sam reddened. ‘For the last time, it wasn’t a stroke.’
‘When a man goes red in the face and keels over, drooling at the mouth, I don’t call it constipation and offer him a laxative. I took a Hippocratic oath.’
‘I’m in great shape. Physically and mentally. Which is more than I can say for you. You’re losing brain cells just sitting there.’
‘Attacking me isn’t the answer. You’ve been under a great deal of stress lately.’
‘I’m about as stressed as a goldfish.’
‘Actually, goldfish die of stress all the time.’
Persis tuned the pair of them out. The two men had been jousting for more years than she could remember. She was glad that Aziz was here. Her father’s recent health issues had frightened her, at first, but she felt confident that Aziz would get to the bottom of it.
Her thoughts returned to the case.
When Seth had sent her to the Asiatic Society, she hadn’t expected much in the way of intrigue. But now she found herself drawn into the case, not just by the circumstances of Healy’s disappearance, but by the facts to hand. Her mind looped back to the strange note in the Bible he’d left behind in place of the stolen manuscript. Why bother with the note at all? And where was Healy now? Why would a renowned scholar destroy his reputation by committing such a crime?
She found it difficult to believe that Healy was motivated by monetary gain. The academics that frequented her father’s bookshop had always struck her as otherworldly, lost to the abstractions of their scholarly endeavours. There was no doubting the immense value of the stolen volume, but she was certain – on no more evidence than her own instinct – that something else lay behind Healy’s curious behaviour.
‘I’m going to say a few words,’ said Sam.
She watched as he trundled his wheelchair to the front of the congregation, waiting for the mob to settle down. ‘Like me, many of you knew Boman. I’ve heard many of you talk eloquently today about how smart he was, how generous, how accomplished; a good family man, a pillar of our community.’ Sam paused, looked down at his feet, then back up again. ‘Well, not me. The man was a liar, a cheat, and a scoundrel. The only reason I came here today was to make sure he’s remembered as he was and not as a bunch of snivelling hypocrites would like him to be.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Aziz beside her.
Persis sighed. This was going to take longer than she had thought.
Chapter 4
A brass band was playing on John Adams Street, bludgeoning passers-by with a cacophony of trombone, tuba, trumpet, and French horn. A man dressed in Congress white stood beside the entrance to Malabar House handing out leaflets.
She looked up at the building’s façade, certain that the plaster must be crumbling and the gargoyles lining the edge of the roof would have fled.
Malabar House was the corporate headquarters of one of the country’s leading business houses, a four-storey Edwardian affair, fronted by red Malad stone and large casement windows set behind balustraded balconies. In the seven months since she’d graduated from the academy, it had become her second home. Sharing the building with corporate worker ants had proved to be a minor inconvenience. In many ways, the police presence at Malabar House was all but invisible. Few knew of the station’s existence; the cases that arrived at their door, such as they were, tended to be referred via other units in the service.
She walked through the arcaded front entrance, and then down into the basement where the station had
been given a temporary home.
The place, a maze of battered steel filing cabinets and old desks, was all but deserted.
She saw Sub-Inspector George Fernandes hunched over his desk. A big man with a head like a medicine ball and a thick moustache, he spotted her and quickly turned back to the report he was typing one-fingered on an ancient Remington. She brushed angrily past him – the mere sight of Fernandes these days caused a throbbing at her temples.
On her desk, she discovered the Bible they’d taken from the Society. Birla had left it there inside an evidence envelope, together with a note detailing his activities since returning from Healy’s home. The note told her that Archie Blackfinch had dusted the Bible for fingerprints and would report back in due course.
At the far end of the office she knocked on Seth’s door and was summoned inside.
The superintendent was smoking behind his desk, a glass of Scotch balanced precariously on the edge. She coughed in the cloud of lung-searing smoke and glared at him.
Seth ignored her for a moment as if savouring the calm before the storm.
A man of intellect and no small talent, the SP had once been groomed for the top, a rising star in the Indian Imperial Police. But the advent of independence had seen his ambitions collide headfirst with the sympathies of those seeking to redress the imbalances of British India. Men like Roshan Seth had, in the eyes of many, performed their duties a little too zealously under their former colonial masters.
Seth found himself sidelined to Malabar House, a temporary crime branch unit, supposedly established to handle the overflow of cases from the state’s Criminal Investigation Department, the much-maligned CID.
Seth knew the truth, of course.
Like a limping horse, he’d been put out to pasture until it was time to send him onwards to the glue factory where he might be shot and put to some use.
There were moments when he seemed inclined to do the job himself.
He stirred in his chair, waved his glass at her. ‘So, what have those queer ducks at the Society been up to?’
She quickly briefed him on the case, the missing copy of Dante’s masterpiece, John Healy’s disappearance. When she mentioned the manuscript’s value, Seth straightened, taking the cigarette from his lips. ‘A million dollars?’
His tone was disbelieving.
‘That was almost two decades ago. Who knows what it’s worth now.’
‘But who would you even sell it to? Something that famous, you could never let it surface publicly again.’
‘Apparently, there are private collectors willing to pay a fortune for a manuscript this rare.’
‘The Italians will have a fit when they find out. Now I understand why Shukla gave us the case. That man has a sixth sense for trouble.’ His finger tapped the side of the glass. ‘So, what next?’
‘We need to talk to the local fences. It’s highly unlikely Healy will try to get rid of the volume in Bombay, but we’ll check anyway. Birla’s already called the hospitals, the Juhu aerodrome, RAF Santacruz, and the major train stations. Healy’s description has been circulated.’
‘Do you have a photograph?’
She took out the cutting she’d taken from the bulletin board at the Asiatic Society and showed it to him. Seth grimaced, his lower lip curling into a pout. ‘Miserable-looking bastard.’
Persis refrained from comment. For a man who’d once venerated the British, Seth’s bitterness knew no bounds. He wasn’t alone.
Post-independence India was not shaping up as the utopia many had dreamed of. The British had departed, and that was only right and proper, but Prime Minister Nehru’s planned agrarian reforms had set the cat among the pigeons. Noble houses and feudal landlords were fighting tooth and nail to prevent legislation that would effectively strip them of their ancestral wealth and parcel it out to the peasantry that had, until now – with the blessings of the British – remained steadfastly beneath their boot-heels.
Nehru’s dreams for a better India had collided sharply with the iceberg of entrenched reality.
She couldn’t help but feel that Gandhi’s assassination had changed the course of her nation’s political future. Nehru endeavoured to forge a country based on Gandhian ideals, but lacked his late comrade’s force of personality.
Or perhaps cult was a better word.
That was how her father had always described Gandhi’s followers. Caught up in the zeal of the Quit India movement, she hadn’t understood what he’d meant then, but the cracks in the façade of the new republic were gradually becoming clear to one and all.
Seth handed the cutting back to her. ‘I suppose you’d better get on with it. And try to keep a low profile. The longer we can keep a lid on this, the better. Once word gets out, we’ll be under siege; you realise that, don’t you?’
She understood. Her last investigation had engendered national headlines; there was little doubt that the present case would also send shock waves around the country, though for different reasons. Given all the treasures that had been looted from the subcontinent over the centuries, it would be bad form to so tamely surrender a priceless European artefact. In the space of a heartbeat, the case had gone from an art theft to a matter of national honour.
‘Sir, where is everyone?’
‘If you mean Oberoi, he’s extended his leave. Apparently, he’s managed to twist an ankle while skiing.’
Persis refrained from smiling. Hemant Oberoi, the other full inspector in the unit, had made his antipathy clear from the moment she’d set foot in Malabar House. The scion of a wealthy family, he was the epitome of arrogance, a man who expected life’s red carpet to be rolled out for him at every juncture. A badly judged affair had derailed his career and he now found himself treading water at Malabar House with those he considered beneath him in every way.
The arrival of a woman had been the final straw.
‘As for the others . . .’ Seth lit another cigarette. ‘They’re out on crowd control. In case you’ve forgotten, Bombay is still hosting the National Games. Birla and Haq are at Brabourne Stadium.’
The National Games had been foisted on to the city by the state of Bengal, on the far side of the country, still recovering from the horrors of Partition.
Sawn in half by the Radcliffe Line, the state had seen horrendous rioting that had accompanied the migration of Hindus and Muslims between West Bengal and the newly created East Pakistan. More than two years later, the region remained turbulent; memories of the Calcutta killings – the communal bloodshed unleashed by Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s call for ‘direct action’ during his push for a Muslim homeland – lingered in the state psyche.
The ongoing administrative turmoil meant that Bengal had begged off organising the National Games, foisting them on to Maharashtra, with Bombay, as the state capital, the natural venue. After all, the port metro was still the nation’s entertainment capital; thousands of Europeans lingered in India’s ‘city of jazz’.
She returned to her desk, studiously ignoring Fernandes, who continued his grim, mono-fingered typing. Slipping out the Bible from its envelope, she ran her fingers over the plush binding, then opened it to the flyleaf.
What’s in a name?
Akoloutheo Aletheia
Follow the truth. There was no earthly reason for Healy to leave this message. To sign it and to date it. With each passing moment, she became certain that he had done so deliberately. Which meant that he wished for the message to be found, read, and acted upon.
The question was: were they smart enough to understand its meaning?
She dragged her own typewriter to the centre of the desk and inserted a sheet of carbon paper, then spent the next couple of hours typing up an FIR, a first incident report. Her notes were extensive – it was a habit she’d picked up during her teenage years, recording the minutiae of daily life in a set of cloth-bound journals taken from her father’s bookshop. The journals had been a way of combating the loneliness of growing up without siblings, without a mother �
�� her father had never remarried – and with few friends.
By the time she looked up again, it was past seven. She was about to pack up for the day when Seth’s door opened and he beckoned her inside.
‘Another case came in. With Oberoi out of action and you leading the Healy case, I’m giving it to Fernandes. I want you to supervise him.’
She stiffened. ‘I won’t work with Fernandes.’
‘Won’t?’ Seth smiled nastily. ‘And here’s me thinking these stars on my shoulder meant I was in charge.’
‘You know what he did. You really expect me to just . . . forget?’
Seth picked up a silver pen, rolled it around in his fingers. ‘Fernandes is a good officer. He made a mistake and ended up here. He was offered a way out and he took it.’
During the investigation into the death of Sir James Herriot it had become clear that a member of the team was leaking information to the newspapers, deliberately fuelling an unflattering portrait of Persis’s handling of the investigation. She’d suspected Hemant Oberoi, but, to her horror, had discovered that it had been Fernandes, a man she’d admired.
‘Integrity is a movable feast,’ muttered Seth. His eyes were hollow and she wondered if he was thinking about his own situation. ‘Fernandes did what he thought was right. For himself, for his family. And he’s hardly alone in his prejudice against women on the force.’
‘That doesn’t make it right.’
‘Persis, look around you. None of us are here because it was right. What cannot be cured must be endured.’
She glared at him, but it was pointless. Seth was right. What was life at Malabar House, last way station on the road to obscurity, but an exercise in endurance?
‘What’s the case?’
‘A woman’s been found dead. On the tracks near Sandhurst Road station.’
‘That’s by the Dongri police thana. Why aren’t they handling it?’
‘Because our victim is a white woman. The station-in-charge at Dongri doesn’t want the case. Fortunately for him, he’s distantly related to our beloved commissioner. He pulled some strings and voila! Another grenade lands in my lap.’ He ran a hand through his thinning hair, his slim moustache crinkling in distaste. ‘Take Fernandes and check it out. For the avoidance of doubt: I’m not asking, I’m telling.’
